seemed annoyed at the interruption. But presently this pair drove down together to the wharves in Edward Stanwicke's coach, and they were there waiting when the Queen Bess's gig set her passengers ashore.
Of the meeting of Jolie Stanwicke of Hampshire and Edward Stanwicke, her father—often called Lord Stanwicke in Carolina—there is little to tell. Nor can much be told concerning the meeting of Jolie Stanwicke and the tall, full-blooded, wide-shouldered man whom her father presented as Captain Lance Falcon. They had never seen each other before. Yet, as their eyes met, something passed between them, something very subtle and strange.
If Jolie Stanwicke was aware even then, she forgot quickly. There was much to be seen as she drove through the streets with her father and Captain Falcon in the Stanwicke coach emblazoned with the Stanwicke arms—Mistress Wilkinson had been carried off by her husband, while a messenger of the Governor of Carolina had met Mr. Richard Barradell at the wharf to present His Excellency's compliments and extend his hospitality. Jolie, gazing out of the coach's narrow windows, saw the life of a new town built between the vast ocean on the one hand and on the other a forest which men believed to be vaster even than the great Atlantic: a new town which was England's strongest outpost against the power of Spain in the New World—that ruthless, implacable power which again and again had stained the shores
